Gardner Dozois
Gardner Dozois is the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and the annual anthology
series The Year's Best Science Fiction, now up to its 18th annual volume, as well as many
other anthologies. He has won more than 10 Hugo Awards as the year's best editor, and 2 Nebula Awards for his
own short fiction. His short fiction appears in Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner
Dozois. He is the author or editor of better than 70 books, including the anthologies
The Good Old Stuff and The Good New Stuff.
He's also edited such theme anthologies as Dinosaurs! and Dog Tales!.
He lives in Philadelphia.

It goes without saying that this is an eminently worthwhile book, one of SF's major institutions, now in
its eighteenth volume. There are many highlights here, selected in spite of certain predictable editorial
pitfalls (such as undue obeisance to established names, and an occasional seeming unawareness of how contrived
and clotted data-dense Hard SF diction can become). Any year's output of short fiction is bound to be beyond
ready summary; perhaps it is best to go by theme, tracing skeins of trend through Dozois's Labyrinth.

Alternate History SF forms a surprisingly large bloc this year, and for all some commentators' skepticism as
to this sub-genre's right to be counted as SF, it fully earns its prominence in this instance. "A Colder War" by
Charles Stross is a vision of a late 20th century overwhelmed by its fratricidal hostilities, which
creatures out of Lovecraft's Mythos are horrifyingly well placed to exploit; this tour de force chillingly
expands the envelope of the uchronia's expressiveness, in a nightmare turned infinite and sideways. Stross'
other entry, "Antibodies," is almost as effective: here, with the same ruthless intellectual sleight of
hand, AIs are depicted amok in many timelines, and the fragility of the human race acquires an almost
unbearable emphasis. Charles Stross is the new genius of British SF, and other writers, even Americans,
are, at least for now, in his shadow; but his ingenuity is matched in some respects by Steven Utley
in "The Real World," the best of his Silurian tales to date. A time-traveller returns to his present
knowing that it cannot really be home, that it is a simulacrum only; but as he probes its textures, he
learns a profound existential lesson, even amid the ever-falser pomps of Hollywood. Enlightenment well earned.

Analog writers Rick Cook and Ernest Hogan continue the Alt. Hist. fest with a curiously alluring
novella, "Obsidian Harvest," a faultlessly narrated gumshoe detective thriller set in an Aztec Empire
victorious over the Spanish and perplexed by Peruvian dinosaurs; the scenario is full of logical holes,
but pre-Columbian Mexico was sinister in spades, and that legacy is successfully continued here, a milieu
of daggers and dark beliefs. A similar eerieness of affect attends Michael Swanwick's "The Raggle
Taggle Gypsy-O," which salts the timelines with heroism, and grief, and mischief, with all the
author's characteristic savage ingenuity. But a sour note must be sounded. "Oracle" by Greg Egan,
seemingly included on name rather than merit, is a clumsy farrago of ungainly ideas and polemical
platitudes, a vision of Alan Turing and C.S. Lewis in philosophical battle which is true neither to
them, nor to their period, nor to the issues concerned. Egan is a master of extrapolation, but his
hindsight is an intolerable mixture of vindictiveness and the unprovable. No more sermons,
please. Don't orate, speculate.

Perhaps alternate history, being all about subversive glances to the side, is best written
obliquely, ironically, in the manner of Stross and Swanwick. A delicacy of a different sort
animates the better Near Future SF stories, an acute attentiveness to the nuances of present
becoming; this is the acid test in that bracket. "The Juniper Tree" by John Kessel is a superb
examination of tendencies in sexual politics, a treatment of masculine obsolescence in the context
of a lunar utopia. Susan Palwick's "Going After Bobo" is rather laboriously cute, but does make its
claustrophobic point articulately enough. A similar sense of desperation on the cusp of radical
change infuses "The Cure For Everything" by Severna Park, with a greater if less responsible sense
of release at the end. "Snowball in Hell" by Brian Stableford is unreadable, so its argument (something
about the reverse of the Gadarene Swine) will remain blurred. But redemption is at hand in two
magnificent novellas, "Radiant Green Star" by Lucius Shepard, a lush vision of new terrors and
ageless responsibilities in the Vietnam of a few decades hence, and "Tendeleo's Story," the latest
addition to the Chaga sequence, Ian McDonald's marvellous panorama of Third World plights and
possibilities. Also very strong is "Patient Zero" by Tananarive Due, although its hopelessness is a
strong intimation that we are in the process of becoming nothing at all, and the near future had
better offer something more appetizing than that. In the Near Future category, then: one utter
misfire, two near misses, and four impeccable (if in one case impeccably gloomy) direct hits. And
there's also "The Suspect Genome," a long novella by Peter F. Hamilton, in fact too long to be
subject to any comment whatsoever.

The further future gets its due also, entertainingly, if at times hamfistedly. "The Birthday of the
World," which may conceivably fall into Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish series, is one of her finest
stories, a crafty yet lyrical intensification of the plight of the last free Incas, shifted
to another planet and another species and placed under intense anthropological scrutiny. "Savior," a
bleak yet expansive novella by Nancy Kress, is a fascinating look at Earth across centuries of chaos
and biotechnological adaptation; the focus is a mute alien beacon in the American wilderness, and the
end of its silence is brilliantly, and disorientingly, rendered. "Reef" by Paul J. McAuley, one of his
Quiet War tales, is gaudily bedizened with concept but curiously lifeless at core (here the
hamfistedness comes in); and "Crux" by Albert Cowdrey is a glib, fast tour of a devastated future
ruled in the spirit of Genghiz Khan, with time-travel acrobatics and fleshly amusements not quite
compensating for the brash immaturity of their telling. But no such criticisms for "On the Orion
Line," a new and probing space opera in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence; or "Great Wall of Mars,"
one of the most dramatic episodes yet in Alastair Reynolds' continuing future history of humans
and Inhibitors; or for "The Great Goodbye," Robert Charles Wilson's contribution to Nature's vignettes
of the emerging millennium, a searingly cunning exercise in the tricks of literary perspective. Far
vistas of time do well for themselves this year, with only two partial blots on the cosmic
escutcheon; maybe there's a future after all, for SF no less than ourselves, Ms. Due's
prognostications notwithstanding.

So a fine anthology again, this Eighteenth Annual Collection, its inevitable blips and anomalies
only a mild distraction from the feast of fictions. There won't be a better reprint SF anthology
this year; but then, at this size and with this editor, how could there be?

Since completing a Ph.D. on uses of history in SF, Nick Gevers has become a moderately
prolific reviewer and interviewer in the field of speculative fiction. He has published in INTERZONE,
NOVA EXPRESS, the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SF, and GALAXIES; much of his work is available at
INFINITY PLUS, of which he is
Associate Editor. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.